Jamie Iredell's Blog, page 2

IWAFDCSI Tour 2013

I will be preaching across America this fall.

In the first week of October (10/2) I will be in Portland, OR, cheering on the writers (and hopefully crashing it so that I read w/ them) reading at Lit Hop. 

10/5-10/6: I will be sitting on a panel, giving a reading, and a workshop at Portland's Wordstock Festival. 

10/12: I'll be reading at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, TN. If you're not into my stupid words, check out my amazing homegirl TJ Jarrett, who's reading at the same time. 


11/5: I'm reading at Book Thug Nation, NYC. Reading w/ John Dermot Woods and Hugh Sheehy
Wednesday 11/6: Reading Mellow Pages Library, NYC. Reading w/ John Dermot Woods and Kendra Grant Malone

Thursday 11/7: Brooklyn Launchpad w/ Moonshot Magazine, NYC. Reading w/ Mark Cugini, Carrie Murphy, Eugenia Leigh, & Daniel Long.
Friday 11/8: Reading in Northhampton, MA, Reading w/ Chelsea Martin and Laura van den Berg
Saturday 11/9: Baltimore, MD. Will be awesome, because my homeboys Adam Robinson, Justin Sirois, and Joseph Young are the coolest dudes to hang with.
Sunday 11/10: Philadelphia, PA. Reading @ Tirefire w/ Amber Sparks and Lindsay Hunter.
Sunday 11/17: Ann Arbor, MI. Reading w/ Chelsea Martin & Michael W. Clune. 

Seems like I'm too busy to do much of anything these days...

Seems like I'm too busy to do much of anything these days. I watch a lot of Star Trek TOS right now because, well, damn. Everything else on Netflix sucks.

Here is what will likely be the cover of my next book


That shiz come out from Future Tense Books soon-like. Pre-orders are up! There's gonna be a limited hardcover. Stoked, so stoked about it. 

What to post here in the wake of the epic Book of Freaks ...

What to post here in the wake of the epic Book of Freaks free-for-all? I don't know. I have been working on 2 books, both of which I have a goal of finishing by the end of summer. These are not first drafts, I should mention. I have been working on these books--both of them combined--for about four or five years. One is a book of nonfiction and the other is a novel. The nonfiction is in its 8th or 9th draft (I lost count and stopped numbering the files) and the novel is probably in its third draft. The latter of these two is more nebulous in that the process of writing it was quite different.

For the nonfiction I composed a complete first draft, and wrote multiple revisions, tried different things, added tons of material, etc. Now, though, I've taken much of the later material and reformulated it so that it works in the original first draft. I know that sounds probably more complicated than it actually is, so I'll just say that I went back to the drawing board.

The novel started as me simply transcribing dreams. I knew I wanted to write the novel, and I had some ideas as to who the characters were, and as such they were floating around in my head for some time. Probably because of that I started having very strange dreams that seemed to feature the very characters I was thinking of. What better way to characterize such people that to transcribe these dreams? That pretty much comprised the "first draft." It was short--maybe 20K words--very note-y and surreal (duh), like dreams. For a while I played around with that material, but then I had to work on other stuff because of deadlines.

Later, I thought a little more coherently about the characters, and a new character came to me, and I knew he needed to be fleshed out, that his story was integral. So I wrote it. I spent about six months and wrote a short novel about that guy. That turned out to be Part I of the current draft, so I consider it Draft 2 of the novel-at-large.

Thus I'd say I'm in the midst of draft 3, since I've been at work making the book into a book. I don't know how many drafts this book will require, but I honestly hope it's not 8 or 9. Fuck that. That's way too much work to put into anything.

I AM SO GODDAMN DESPERATE HERE'S A STORY

Donner SummitOct. 31, 1996 Cigarettes might save us. Because of John’s habit—which I’ve lectured him about, since Nana died of emphysema—we have his Bic lighter that Brandon’s been using to relight the fire. We dug up dry twigs and branches under the snow—so much of it this early in the season. I kept an eye on the weather before this trip and knew an off-shore depression headed our way. I thought we’d get rain and told the boys to pack their rain gear. But not snow. Boys. I still call them that though John’s thirty and Brandon’s twenty-six. I can’t help feeling like this is all my fault. This was supposed to be our time—the men’s time—to bond. After all those years spent backpacking, teaching them everything I know—yelling at them each time they screwed something up—it comes to this: John and I haven’t spoken in a day. 
Nov. 1stBreak in the snow this morning, but no sun. Wind out of the West. John just returned. The snow’s too deep. He’s flushed and wet, rubbing his lobster-red hands together and holding his armpits. He still hasn’t even looked at me. That was his second attempt to reach the pass around Mount Judah. If we can make it there, he thinks, it’s all downhill afterwards, and only two miles back to Donner Summit where the car’s parked. It’s been a series of screw-ups. First, choosing the time for this trip. We’ve always gone in October, our favorite time of the year in the Sierra. The mosquitoes are gone, the weather’s still warm, but not the scorching heat of summer, and stunning yellows and reds paint the willows and aspens. But we’ve never gone this late in the month, and we’ve never seen snow, until now. These early storms come in sometimes, though. I wasn’t thinking. The boys said they wanted to skip the trip this year. I couldn’t get out of work because the dealership ran an end-of-summer blowout sale that ran over two months and after that we had inventory. But I wouldn’t hear of missing our annual backpacking week. We haven’t missed this trip in sixteen years and I would be damned if a little rain stopped us. I talked John into going late in the month and he scheduled the time off work. Brandon’s still in school (who knows if he’ll ever finish), with an otherwise open schedule. So this became the week. I wanted me and the boys to be together. We should have just skipped it. 
Nov. 2ndFroze hard last night after it rained in the afternoon. Terribly cold. To think how beautiful the weather was when we started. Sixty-five degrees that morning and by afternoon we’d just come around and down the windward side of Mount Judah when a cold rain fell, which felt good after the hot hike up and around the mountain. Little did we know that while it rained at six thousand feet—the temperature dropping into the forties—at seven thousand the snow piled in drifts. By night it sifted down in thick flakes. We thought we’d get a dusting; in the morning we had eight inches of powder, and still falling. Today John complained about wanting a cigarette. He ran out.
Nov 3rdBrandon just said that he, and not I, had spilled the pot of boiling snowmelt while trying to feed the fire. I’m grateful to him but guilty all the same. John took it well. He said that’s a problem, but we’re not going to let problems get the best of us anymore. I wonder how he’d have reacted knowing that I spilled the water that put the fire out. The snow’s very deep and there’s a crust over it. Today’s windy, out of the southwest. 
Nov 4th Donner Summit. If there isn’t irony in this situation then I don’t know what irony is. The Donners got caught in the snow at the lake here, about a mile from us as the crow flies, over a thousand feet below us in elevation. They wanted to get to where we’re stuck now, and beyond, down the windward side of these mountains into the Valley. The snow got too deep and without enough food they fell to eating from dead bodies to stay alive. Now we’re stuck up on the mountain and we want to get down to where they camped winter-long, beside Donner Lake, in Truckee, where there are heaters and warm clothes and hot fast food. Right now no blue skies, but there’s been a break in the storm.
Nov 5thFinally blue skies that lift our hopes. But it’s so damn cold, and the snow: dazzling white and endless like a diamond-covered desert. I stayed in the tent, unable to walk, the snow blinding me. Today John made another attempt to summit Mount Judah. We cut pieces from the tent’s rain fly to wrap around our boots in a futile try to keep them dry. John wants to know how the fire went out even though that happened two days ago. If he’s delirious he might be getting hypothermic, so we huddle together for warmth. 
Nov 6thSnow started again last night and carried on to this morning. It’s piled up around the tent and windy. I still can’t help thinking I got us into this mess. It might snow for a week or ten days. In that kind of weather they don’t even snowplow Old Highway 40 where the car’s parked. Even if we made it back we’d have to dig our way in. And then what? Dig ten miles out to Interstate 80? The first morning when we awakened to the snow, Brandon went to start breakfast but mis-punctured the propane canister for the backpacking stove and our fuel wheezed into the air. John was upset but asked if I’d remembered to bring both stoves. And I had brought both canisters, but only one stove top. How was I supposed to know one stove took a certain canister and the other an entirely different kind? You’re supposed to double-check all your gear, remember? John said. I knew that, of course. I’d yelled at them to do just that when they were little. I’m kidding myself and it is my fault that we don’t have a working stove. So, instead of the eggs and oatmeal we’d packed in for breakfast we munched granola bars and decided to head back to the car. We thought there couldn’t have been that much snowfall overnight, but halfway back up the mountain we were in it to our waists. We’d lost the trail and twice Brandon slipped on a submerged rock or fallen tree and almost broke a leg. My own legs cramped up and then we ran out of water. We found this clearing in the pines and Brandon and John stamped the snow down and packed it and we pitched the tent again. 
Nov 7thIt’s got to be 10 degrees out here and, because it was seventy-something when we left for this trip, the only layers we have are t-shirts, sweaters, and raincoats. The fire’s what kept our hopes alive. I’m worried about John getting frostbite, the way he’s been trekking the snow in jeans and rain fly-wrapped hiking boots. He keeps saying, “I just wish I had a fucking cigarette.” The pines bend under the snow weight like angelic question marks. The snow, when it seeps to the skin, so cold it burns, tightens the muscles like frozen rubber. Ice gathers in our nostrils, on our whiskers, our breath pumps out like smoke from our smoldered fire: blue, cold, dead. For hours John has been short with me. Come on, Dad. We don’t have that far to go. He rants about trying to make it to the summit, but he’s wrapped, naked in his sleeping bag. Now he’s talking about the stove again. If only he’d been there to make sure I packed the right gear, he says. It’s his own damn fault for living in Reno. His mother and I have wanted him back in Sacramento since he graduated, but he met that Barbara of his, whom Louise can’t stand. I think Barbara’s just fine, maybe a little bossy. I don’t understand why he’s always spending Thanksgiving with her family. He could spend it with us once in a while. Maybe this year. 
Nov 8thSnow’s stopped. I thought I heard distant voices calling, a helicopter’s blades behind the icy wind. But we can’t tell with the storms in these mountains. We think we hear anything hopeful. I expect that even if we can’t get out of here rescue teams will look for us. Louise knows we were on the Pacific Crest Trail, and so would Barbara, I assume. Jesus save us. If they haven’t heard from us after news of the storm they’d call the authorities. We can’t find any wood, and Brandon never got the fire relit. Twice John has looked back at me where I sit here writing this. His look is sad and tired, maybe lost. No anger, disgust, or fear. I’ve become the old man I always swore I never would, when he was little, after he awakened in the middle of the night and walked, crying, to the family room where Louise and I watched television and he complained of his nightmare where I got old and died. 
Nov 9thWe ate the eggs—cooked once we got the fire going—and all of our granola bars. Food left: a bag of trailmix each, and a large bag of beef jerky. Enough to last a few days, maybe five, if we ration. 
Nov 10thJohn no longer talks of trying to reach the summit. He and I bickered over the stove, and he gets upset (even though he won’t say so) when I can’t move as easily as he and Brandon. And though I know Brandon’s feeling sorry for me—which is why he took the blame for the fire going out—he must feel some resentment too. He even thinks a cigarette might make him feel better, if only he had one. I can’t feel my feet—hardly my hands while I write this. For the longest time my feet killed me with burning pain, like the pins and needles shooting when your foot falls asleep. But for the last four hours I haven’t felt a thing in my feet at all, so I took my frozen boots off. The two small toes on my right foot were yellow, turning black. John retreated to the tent to wrap himself in his sleeping bag. He cursed Brandon—you’ve got to be careful about the fucking fire—still going on about that. Fucking fire fucking fire.     
Nov 11thThey found us! This morning Emergency Search and Rescue came over the ridge above us—four men on snowshoes! They airlifted us out and got us down to Truckee—thank the Lord! In the hospital right now. Snowblindness and frostbite, they say, but I seem to see just fine. Now there are my kids to deal with. Things came to a head when my legs cramped. I’d been scooping red-skinned handfuls of snow to melt in my mouth for water. I can’t make it, I said. Yes, you can, John said. It’s only a little farther, he said. Just hang in there. Then Brandon started to cry. He’s always been overly sensitive, wet his bed until he was ten years old. No wonder he can’t graduate from college and still lives at home. We’re not leaving him here, he blubbered. Of course not, said John. He pulled me to my feet, which hurt like hell and I yelled and struck out, pushing John who stumbled in the snow and fell down the slope, flakes sprinkling his hair like massive dandruff. That’s when he got up and started back up the mountain. I could give a shit about him, he said to Brandon. He’s the reason we’re in this mess. 
Nov 12thHaven’t seen the boys yet, though Louise and Barbara have been in to see me. I hate hospitals. Louise knows that, so she brought me some hot creamed onions, like Nana used to make—my favorite. They’re calling us extremely lucky—a miracle, even—on the news. They say that John kept saying he went on to the pass but the snow got so deep he was unable to find the trail. Brandon says, “Snow storms are dreadful to us now.” All I can think is that it froze hard last night, and what if we were still up on that mountain, the three of us losing it? It’s very cold this morning, even in this hospital bed. But the sun shining brilliantly through the window renovates my spirits, praise God. Barbara asked if the reporters had been in to see me. And they have. I told them: “We prayed the God of mercy to deliver us if it be His will.” When the reporters asked what I would have done had the rescuers not come for another day, week, etcetera, I couldn’t say, but thought about how some of the old folk, they always say the snow will be there until June. Louise said, holding my hands, teary-eyed, that Thanksgiving will be extra special this year. We’re so lucky, she said, to have each other.

Acknowledgments Acknowledgements are pa...

Acknowledgments
Acknowledgements are part of a book—similar to the one you now hold—wherein the author(s) dole(s) out appreciation for those who helped in the creation and ultimate publication of the volume. Interestingly, and coincidentally, the Acknowledgments page of a book invariably falls either at the volume’s immediate beginning or terminal pages, as evidenced in the following example: it must be noted that the compilers of the current volume are grateful to the editors of the journals and magazines below where many of the entries in this book were first published, sometimes in different form:

Action, Yes; Abjective; Everyday Genius, Hobart; Jellyroll Magazine; JMWW; Keyhole; Mad Hatters’ Review; nth position; OCHO; Opium Magazine; PANK; Robot Melon; ServingHouse; Smokelong Quarterly; The 2ndHand; and on Featherproof Books’ TripleQuick Fiction iPhone App.

Thanks to Kevin Sampsell for making this book possible, and to his Future Tense crew: Christina Brauner, Bryan Coffelt, and Brian David Smith.

Thanks to my family: the Iredells and the Babcocks.

Thanks to Christopher Bundy, Mike Dockins, and Man Martin for reading drafts of this book, and to Blake Butler and Spencer, for inadvertently inspiring parts of it.

Of course: Sarah Babcock.

Action Film, The In the action film the...

Action Film, The
In the action film the hero must have an alliterative name, because it’s catchy and everyone remembers it, and it speaks to how badass the hero is. Think B.A. Baracus, think Jesse James. In fact, the action hero’s name is James James. When a sultry brunette says, Hey, who are you? our hero says, “The name is James. James James.” In the action novel there are exactly forty-three explosions. It’s hard to describe the explosions, except to say, “The car tumbled down the mountainside, and exploded”; or, “James James was thrown to the ground by the tremendous explosion.” That’s why this novel will be made into an action film. Then you can actually see the explosions. The female lead looks like a really hot actress. She’s hot. She’s played by a really hot actress. Back to explosions: James James and his hot actress love interest always jump to safety, even if the tremendously huge explosion tosses them like rag dolls to the ground. Try to get a rag doll into the action film—or the novel. Maybe there’s a little girl in there somewhere, James James’s estranged daughter from a marriage he lost due to amnesia caused by being thrown against a steel pipe by one grandiose explosion. Worry not about the rag doll; that’s why movies have the props department. When these explosions go off, so close that their shock waves toss James James and his incredibly hot love interest to the ground, the heat from the explosion would burn the hair off their legs. The hot actress, though, she doesn’t have any hair on her legs, because any girl like that always has her legs waxed. And it would only happen to James
James if he were wearing shorts, but James James only wears shorts in the film’s earliest scenes, during a period of relative peace, where he basks upon a white sand shore. Other than that he’s always wearing jeans, or cargo pants. He wears the cargo pants because that’s where he stores all his explosive devices. It’s important to note that James James is a karate expert. 

After DetoxThis is the man who gets a job at a place like...

After Detox
This is the man who gets a job at a place like Performance Exhaust, after he tells the owner—a skinny Vietnamese named Wang—that he’s worked imports all his life, his father a Volkswagen man, his grandfather Mercedes. Wang asks him to look at the automatic transmission on a ‘94 Sentra. The man laughs, and—no surprise here—Wang hires him.

The schedule is a day shift: eight AM to five PM. At first everything goes according to plan. Our man stumbles in mornings and breathes open the garage doors. His own breath escapes like the fog that sits over the tiny valley where the shop has been planted. Our man goes to work, a car at a time, overhauling engines, transmission rebuilds. Wang wanders in around ten, a Kool dangling from the corner of his mouth, his cellphone hooked onto his belt and constantly beeping that annoying Nextel beep. Wang gets his hands under an open hood and removes a hose. The shop stays open till nine PM and Wang does all the work after our boy leaves at five.

One day, Wang’s Nextel goes off and he starts jabbering in his Viet-lingo, then he laughs and jigs around some more in that fucked talk. He lights a fresh Kool. Our man who is fresh out of detox is replacing a blown head gasket on a ‘64 Lincoln, a beauty, suicide doors and everything. Wang steps away, ching-chonging as he goes. Our man keeps at the Lincoln, but does not finish, as a middle- aged couple’s Ford jalopies into the lot, spewing steam and smoke like a dragon. Wang never returns. At five our hero closes the shop doors and goes home.
Next morning, Wang waits for detox-man in the office. The man has never seen Wang there this early. “You lazy American,” Wang says. “I leave shop, and you close up, now customer angry.” He points at the unfinished Lincoln. Detox-man says that he worked from eight to five, that that was his shift. Wang says he’ll pay overtime.

Wang stops coming to the shop in the mornings. Every other day he wanders in around lunchtime, scans the lot of vehicles waiting to be repaired. “Hey lazy white,” Wang says. “You work faster, I pay.” Then he disappears again, kissing his Nextel.

At lunch, detox-man walks across the street to the sports bar. At first he orders chicken wings and Cokes. Then he replaces the Coke with Budweiser. Then he replaces the chicken wings with Makers Mark.

After lunch, Wang’s smoking a Kool in the middle of the car-littered lot. He stamps his tiny oriental foot. When detox-man says he needs help to get everything done on time Wang’s eyes grow into tea saucers and his mouth into a donut hole. “Oh, you drunk! You drunk! I smell the booze!”

Wang goes to the office to write up detox-man’s last check. Our hero grabs the keys to the Lincoln, which he’s now finished and has stashed around the side of the shop. Wang hands over detox-man’s check. “You very bad, drunk lazy American,” Wang says. Detox-man says thanks, thanks for the job. Wang waves him off like he might wave at mosquitoes. The smoke from his Kool scatters into tiny thunderstorms.
When detox-man drives away, the windows down, the radio playing on the classic rock station (The Eagles), he thinks about moving out of town. He thinks he should go to his room and get his clothes and just drive off. Then, on the freeway on-ramp, he thinks: screw the clothes. 

Americans If you visit the United State...

Americans
If you visit the United States of America, you’re greeted by a Haitian, your passport’s examined by a Jamaican, your baggage tossed from an aluminum belly by Mexicans. No one ever says that they’re American. Ask any of them and they’re Irish or Inuit or Ivory Coastian. Almost all of them are Puerto Ricans. Because of this global attitude, Americans think they own everything, especially America, and by that they mean Earth. Americans will tell you that your country has terrible Mexican food. They especially dislike Mexico’s Mexican food. Americans reek of petroleum and dream of opening McDonalds on distant planets, which is why all American astronomers are in pursuit of extra solar habitats. Instead of palms and fingers, Americans shake with a hamburger patty and frankfurters. And even the frankfurters—they’ll tell you—are better than Frankfurtian frankfurters. The problem with Americans is their annoying politeness: they say, have some cholesterol, does your daughter speak American? Your daughter does not. Yet fret not: the American doesn’t care. If you do not understand American now, you soon will. 

armless wonder For the woman with no ar...

armless wonder
For the woman with no arms, life is a constant dexterity demonstration. Her feet snip scissors through a sheet of cardstock, rectangling out a plane. Her feet ink her signature, lilting in whorls, smooth, seamless as her face. She is Venus—not the goddess, but the planet—a star so bright it blinds, a star with phases: whole, waxing, waning, gone. Her feet caress her husband’s skin. Her toes stream his tears, which stream his cheeks when onlookers look on. “It’s okay,” she whispers. To the starers her feet strike a match and spark her cigarette, tipping the end to the ashtray, butt gripped between big toe and the next little piggy. Her father had called her toes that, piggies, and she laughed and rolled helpless when he pinched a piggy in those wondrous digits about which she knew nothing: fingers. Father sang: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home. . .” 

asshole This variety of human can be se...

asshole
This variety of human can be seen in urban areas across planet Earth. He struts down the street, which is more like an avenue, it is so wide. Skyscrapers scrape the edge of the sky—should we consider “edge” as “troposphere”—far above the cars’ roofs and above this guy’s faux-hawk, both of which are also tropospheric. Below his loafers the sidewalk glitters with spit out wads of chewing gum, many of which spat by our man, for this man decided long ago not to believe in garbage cans. He eschews recycling. All areas where this filth can be found is called “crust.” This guy struts and never walks, and while doing so he reads and sends text messages and emails from his smart phone and so never walks in a straight line. It’s insufferable to find oneself attempting to pass this man for his weaving. He has a girlfriend, and, at one time previously, had a boyfriend. The boyfriend this guy left, feeling—like one does about quitting in the middle of high school baseball tryouts—that it just wasn’t his thing, not his “calling”. This man, the one we’re talking about, is an asshole.